Tag Archives: windows 7 rtm

nce upon a time I wanted to put Windows 7 on my laptop, mostly because I hate answering my wife’s questions about Vista when she uses it. I want her to skip Vista entirely. Putting Windows 7 on and getting the laptop fully functional isn’t an easy task, because Sony makes a tightly integrated piece of equipment. All of the little buttons and gizmos are based on 32-bit Vista drivers. But, with a weekend’s worth of time to kill, I googled and experimented a bunch and got it working. Many thanks to the people who wrote the tutorials and tools this article is based on (see Sources links at the bottom). These instructions are specific to the VGN-CR231E, but it should be similar for other CRs and maybe even other VAIO laptop series that run Vista.

Use VAIO Recovery Center in Vista to create VAIO Recovery DVDs if you don’t already have them.

Boot from your Windows 7 RC x86 DVD (32-bit version) and install Windows 7 on your laptop, leaving the recovery partition alone (click the “Drive options” button when the installer asks you where to install to see all partition options).

Once Windows 7 is up and running, use Windows Update to get all important updates, and any optional updates for drivers (most likely for Display and Wireless Network devices).

Use Mod2Wim.bat to extract WIM files from the VAIO Recovery DVDs (NOTE: be careful not to reboot while a VAIO Recovery DVD is in your drive; it can make your hard drive unbootable and cause you to have to do a repair from the Window 7 DVD to fix the problem.)